Sunday, October 4, 2015

Today I'll be doing a quick post for allergy sufferers needing to sing soon, from my personal experience last week.

With a 45 minute full band gig to do and heavy frogs on sluggish vocal cords typical of my voice during season changes, this is what worked:

I warmed up slowly and for a long time with exercises as well as some head voice work with a few of the 24 Italian songs (you could do any other head voice songs you know)

Did I say head voice work? Incredibly important. I played around with head voice for quite a while, never letting it be breathy but very light, just vibrating vocal cord edges at first. Then I carefully increased head voice volume as phlegm dissipated, and came up with more upper register vocal exercises that felt good.

I started challenging my voice on certain parts of range… passagio mix, higher head… teasing but absolutely not pushing it. I remembered that pushing my warmup was what sabotaged my voice and prolonged the ‘getting voice into shape’ that I’ve experienced before.

I drank water water water.. more water and pineapple juice, drinking noticably more all day

And lastly.. I was very careful not to push my speaking voice. I had to teach vocal lessons all week and I really felt red flags in my throat when I talked. But I just pulled my words from the upper part of my mask, careful to use extremely efficient breath pressure so as minimize my vocal cords' work. By the end of the day my voice was absolutely fine. After three days the helium effect was gone, too!

The gig went very well... The John and Judy Rodman band got a standing ovation at the end and my de-frogged voice felt even better than when I started!

I bounced these observations around with my friend Salem Jones of rock band One Soul Thrust, and she added that hot tea with organic virgin coconut oil worked for her. I'll be adding that to my arsenal.